Did the FBI really seize 200,000 pages of documents at Mar-a-Lago?

[Nevilledog]

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Philip Bump
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In a legal filing, Trump's attorneys claimed that the FBI might have removed 200,000 pages of documents from Mar-a-Lago.

They have a motive to inflate the total, but it's interesting to consider just as a question of physical space.

washingtonpost.com
Analysis | Did the FBI really seize 200,000 pages of documents at Mar-a-Lago?
A new court filing from Trump's attorneys makes a hard-to-believe claim.
9:35 AM · Sep 29, 2022

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/29/trump-fbi-search-documents/

No paywall
https://archive.ph/IKrSc

In their latest court filing related to the seizure of material from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, the former president’s attorneys made a remarkable assertion Wednesday about the scale of what was recovered.

“[W]hen Plaintiff’s counsel referred to either 11,000 pages or even 11,000 documents during the status conference (we are still awaiting the transcript), the Government chose not to interject with an accurate number,” they write. “In conversations between Plaintiff’s counsel and the Government regarding a data vendor, the Government mentioned that the 11,000 documents contain closer to 200,000 pages.”

Setting aside the claim about the transcript (which has been made available, including to Washington Post reporters), the claim is striking. The understood scale of what was removed from Trump’s office and a storage room at the facility — generally that 11,000 figure — may be off by a factor of 18.

But: Is it? Is it conceivable that there were some 200,000 pages of material seized, bolstering the Trump team’s argument that the whole process should be slowed down significantly?

Not really, no.

*snip*

[gratuitous]

1. Mark Sumner at Daily Kos had a post about this

Link to Daily Kos here.

It’s not accurate, because this is the Department of Justice’s revised inventory and affidavit concerning the documents removed from Mar-a-Lago. It details the contents of 33 boxes, and those contents are nowhere close to 200,000 pages.

There are 33 legal boxes. In theory, those boxes can hold 4,500 pages each, but that’s essentially clean new paper carefully packed. In those conditions, the 33 boxes would hold close to 150,000 pages. Only these boxes not only contain clean new paper, or even simply documents. They also contain empty folders, newspaper clippings, magazines, photographs, books, and even “articles of clothing.” Even then, many of them are a long way from full.

. . .

The number of pages Trump’s team is using as the basis of their delay is not going to be accurate by an order of magnitude. The 200,000 number may be grabbing headlines, but the real news here is that Trump is doing what he always does—throwing everything at the wall in hopes that something will stick.

[Nevilledog]

2. Next argument....FBI lost 50,000 pages

[Ohio Joe]

3. Maybe...

They gave him teeny tiny papers to fit his teeny tiny hands

[onenote]

4. By way of comparison, the search of Michael Cohen's office resulted in the seizure of 4 million file

Of course most of those probably were electronic files, including emails.

[I_UndergroundPanther]

5. Put that orange ass in jail already.

[Genki Hikari]

6. A smart person

Would say the FBI took fewer documents than they did, to make themselves look more innocent.

But this...thing...isn't smart.

The only good thing about malignant narcissists is that their need to inflate everything to make themselves look bigger and stronger is always their undoing. That, and running their mouths and otherwise going out of their way to draw attention to themselves. They're never able to do the smart thing of shutting up and laying low.

So please proceed with fluffing numbers and indulging your pathological need for attention, Donny DumbF. The schadenfreude is delicious.